Facebook and Amazon Pour Money to Buy NFL Broadcast Copyright

Online sports is part of Amazon’s new campaign to encourage more people to sign up to join the VIP customer club and spend more money to shop at Amazon.

To attract users and develop new businesses, many technology groups have poured money to own the rights to broadcast sports tournaments.

Not only Facebook, technology giants like Amazon, Google are also racing to own the copyright to broadcast live, exclusively major sports tournaments around the world like NFL or Premier League.

Nearly 2 million people watched the live NFL on Amazon.com

Nearly 2 million people logged into the site of the world’s largest online retailer Amazon.com to watch the first live broadcast of an American football game.

According to the American Football Association (NFL), about 1.9 million people participated in watching Amazon’s opening show with the match between Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers in February, 2017.

Previously, in 2016, the first online on Twitter Inc. also attracted 2.3 million people. However, according to Reuters, the number of followers on Amazon “stuck” to watch longer. On average, at least 372,000 viewers watched for 30 seconds longer on Amazon than 243,000 on Twitter Inc.

In the UK, Amazon will exclusively broadcast 20 Premier League matches in the next three seasons from next year. This is a “punch” to broadcast stations like Sky or BT that have dominated the copyright of sports tournaments for years.

This is good news for those who play NFL betting in general and NFL betting in Pennsylvania in particular. The wide broadcast of NFL match on many social network and technology group will help betting players easily update the information of NFL teams and matches quickly and comprehensively, therefore, have accurate assessment and decisions when it comes to NFL betting.

Premier League CEO Richard Scudamore said the deal was designed to attract new competitors, especially focusing on technology firms. The deal with Amazon isn’t expensive, but it could be seen as the start of an important change.

Earlier, Jeff Bezos’ company also surpassed Sky to gain exclusive rights to broadcast the ATP World Tour tennis tournament. Amazon also spent about $40 million to exclusively broadcast the US Open tennis tournament in the UK for 5 years.

UK audiences can watch football and tennis matches for which Amazon has the copyright on the Amazon Prime Video platform. In a letter to shareholders in April, Jeff Bezos revealed that Prime Video has more than 100 million subscribers.

Currently, Google's YouTube also owns the right to broadcast some packages at the American professional football league with the Seattle Sounders and Los Angeles FC clubs – teams with many stars have been playing such as David Beckham and Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

In the United States, Twitter was the first technology firm to own the copyright of the American Football League (NFL) in 2016. In the 2017-2018 season, Amazon also purchased the same package of NFL copyright and in the 2018-2019 season, Twitter, Amazon, YouTube, Verizon also participated in the auction.